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A sink estate is a British term used for a council housing estate with high levels of social problems, particularly crime. The word is often used in certain former British colonies.
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A sink estate is a British term used for a council housing estate with high levels of social problems, particularly crime. The word is often used in certain former British colonies.
The phrase came into usage in the 1980s, [1] and was used by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998, when he referred to "so-called sink estates" in a speech, such as the since-demolished Aylesbury Estate. [2]
Writing in The Guardian , Victoria Pinoncely has argued that the term reinforces a sense of segregation, suggesting that "starved" would be a better term to describe estates that are receiving minimal investment in amenities, infrastructure, and public spaces. [3] She cited the regeneration of the Packington estate in Islington and the Ocean estate in Tower Hamlets as examples of how estates can be revitalised with increased public investment. [3]
Sink estates are often associated with crime and programmes to regenerate these estates include crime-reduction strategies, such as the below listed by the New Statesman :
The poet Bryon Vincent has referred to himself as coming from a sink estate, and spoken about his experiences with being bullied whilst young, and later spells of drug addiction and homelessness. [5] He has argued that locating people with social and fiscal problems in the same area is "an idiotic idea that is destined to create a culture of perpetually spiralling criminality. [6]
A 2014 report by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, The Estate We're In, called on the Government to set up an "Estate Recovery Board" to tackle problems with gang crime, unemployment, truancy and domestic violence. [7]
In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, antisocial behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime.
In criminology, corporate crime refers to crimes committed either by a corporation, or by individuals acting on behalf of a corporation or other business entity. For the worst corporate crimes, corporations may face judicial dissolution, sometimes called the "corporate death penalty", which is a legal procedure in which a corporation is forced to dissolve or cease to exist.
In criminology, blue-collar crime is any crime committed by an individual from a lower social class as opposed to white-collar crime which is associated with crime committed by someone of a higher-level social class. While blue-collar crime has no official legal classification, it holds to a general net group of crimes. These crimes are primarily small scale, for immediate beneficial gain to the individual or group involved in them. This can also include personal related crimes that can be driven by immediate reaction, such as during fights or confrontations. These crimes include but are not limited to: Narcotic production or distribution, sexual assault, theft, burglary, assault or murder.
Yardie is a term often used, particularly within the Caribbean expatriate and Jamaican diaspora, to refer to people of Jamaican origin, though its exact meaning changes depending on context. The term is derived from the Jamaican patois for “home” or "yard". The term may have specifically originated from the crowded "government yards" of two-storey government-funded concrete homes found in Kingston and inhabited by poorer Jamaican residents, though "yard" can also refer to "home" or "turf" in general in Jamaican patois.
The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class.
In criminology, subcultural theory emerged from the work of the Chicago School on gangs and developed through the symbolic interactionism school into a set of theories arguing that certain groups or subcultures in society have values and attitudes that are conducive to crime and violence. The primary focus is on juvenile delinquency because theorists believe that if this pattern of offending can be understood and controlled, it will break the transition from teenage offender into habitual criminal. Some of the theories are functionalist, assuming that criminal activity is motivated by economic needs, while others posit a social class rationale for deviance.
The Aylesbury Estate is a large housing estate located in Walworth, South East London.
Easterhouse is a suburb of Glasgow, Scotland, 6 miles (10 km) east of the city centre on land gained from the county of Lanarkshire as part of an expansion of Glasgow before the Second World War. The area is on high ground north of the River Clyde and south of the River Kelvin and Campsie Fells.
Racial steering refers to the practice in which real estate brokers guide prospective home buyers towards or away from certain neighborhoods based on their race. The term is used in the context of de facto residential segregation in the United States, and is often divided into two broad classes of conduct:
Left realism emerged in criminology from critical criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the left's failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, allowing right realism to monopolize the political agenda on law and order. Left realism argues that crime disproportionately affects working-class people, but that solutions that only increase repression serve to make the crime problem worse. Instead they argue that the root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation, although preventive measures and policing are necessary, but these should be democratically controlled.
Gang-related organised crime in the United Kingdom is concentrated around the cities of London, Manchester and Liverpool and regionally across the West Midlands region, south coast and northern England, according to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. With regard to street gangs the cities identified as having the most serious gang problems, which also accounted for 65% of firearm homicides in England and Wales, were London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. Glasgow in Scotland also has a historical gang culture with the city having as many teenage gangs as London, which had six times the population, in 2008.
The Heygate Estate was a large housing estate in Walworth, Southwark, South London comprising 1,214 homes. The estate was demolished between 2011 and 2014 as part of the urban regeneration of the Elephant & Castle area. Home to more than 3,000 people, it was situated adjacent to Walworth Road and New Kent Road, and immediately east of the Elephant & Castle road intersection. The estate was used extensively as a filming location, due in part to its brutalist architecture.
Chalkhill Estate is located in the Wembley Park area of North West London. It was originally one of three large council estates built in the London Borough of Brent by the early 1970s, along with Stonebridge and South Kilburn. The design was based on that of Park Hill in Sheffield. The high-rise estate was demolished by 2000 and gradually replaced by new low-rise builds.
The definition of mixed-income housing is broad and encompasses many types of dwellings and neighborhoods. Following Brophy and Smith, the following will discuss “non-organic” examples of mixed-income housing, meaning “a deliberate effort to construct and/or own a multifamily development that has the mixing of income groups as a fundamental part of its financial and operating plans” A new, constructed mixed-income housing development includes diverse types of housing units, such as apartments, town homes, and/or single-family homes for people with a range of income levels. Mixed-income housing may include housing that is priced based on the dominant housing market with only a few units priced for lower-income residents, or it may not include any market-rate units and be built exclusively for low- and moderate-income residents. Calculating Area Median Income (AMI) and pricing units at certain percentages of AMI most often determine the income mix of a mixed-income housing development. Mixed-income housing is one of two primary mechanisms to eliminate neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, combat residential segregation, and avoid the building of public housing that offers 100% of its housing units to those living in poverty. Mixed-income housing is built through federal-, state-, and local-level efforts and through a combination of public-private-non-profit partnerships.
Criminology is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, legal sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, scholars of law and jurisprudence, as well as the processes that define administration of justice and the criminal justice system.
In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.
Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council housing or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011 when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in social housing. Dwellings built for public or social housing use are built by or for local authorities and known as council houses. Since the 1980s non-profit housing associations became more important and subsequently the term "social housing" became widely used, as technically council housing only refers to housing owned by a local authority, though the terms are largely used interchangeably.
South Kilburn is a large housing estate in Kilburn, in the London Borough of Brent. Typical of brutalist 1960s designs of public housing in the United Kingdom, it is characterised by high-density housing in low-rise flats and 11 concrete tower blocks. It was approved in 1959 and extended in 1963. This scheme was further developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s; redevelopment occurred during the 2010s. The population is predominantly Afro-Caribbean and Pashtun.
The Winstanley and York Road Estate comprises two large estates of predominantly public housing apartments in Battersea, London, adjacent to Clapham Junction railway station, although some have since passed into private ownership.
sink estates to which people are condemned, with no prospect of getting out
The underclass (...) [is] a product of ghettoisation. Taking a bunch of people with social and fiscal problems and forcing them to live en masse together is an idiotic idea that is destined to create a culture of perpetually spiralling criminality. If we want the disenfranchised underclass to adopt the morality of the mainstream, social housing needs to be integrated into mainstream society."